27 The Tipitaka

The many teachings of the Buddha are written down in traditional scriptures.

The oldest collection of these were written in Pali and Sinhalese language, and they form the basic of the current Thervada tradition known as the Pali Canon. The teachings of the Mahayan school were written in Sanskrit, which were subsequently translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Tibetan languages.

234    Now let us familiarize  ourselves with the structure of the Buddhist scriptures - the Tipitaka. The word ‘pitaka’ means ‘a basket’, a  word used because just as  workmen  in ancient India relayed baskets of earth from the head  of  one person to the next, the Dhamma was passed from the  memory of the  teacher to that of the student. 

The prefix ‘ti’ means ‘three’ and hence Tipaka means the Three Baskets.

The early Buddhist canon is traditionally referred to as the “Three Baskets”

(Sanskrit: Tripitaka; Pali: Tipitaka).

These three Baskets are:

the Sutta Pitaka - the Basket of discourses,

the Vinaya Pitaka - the Basket of Discipline, and

the Abhidhamma Pitaka - the Basket of Analysis.

According to Buddhist tradition, this division was instituted at the First Buddhist Council not long after the pari-nirvana of the Buddha. This canon was written in the Pali language which is believed to have been derived from a dialect used in the region of Magadha.

The Second Council introduced some modifications to the rules of monastic discipline, and later councils added other texts to the canon. The canon was transmitted orally, but after a time of political and social turmoil King Vattagamani of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) ordered that it be committed to writing. This was accomplished between 35 and 32 BCE. The Suttas and Vinaya were written in Pali, but some of the commentaries were in Sinhala. The Sinhala texts were translated into Pali in the 5th centuries CE.

Suttas: Discourse spoken by the Buddha, and sometimes by his immediate disciples.

The word ‘sutta’ literally means ‘a thread’ and the Buddha's discourses are called this because each of them has a ‘thread of meaning’ or a ‘line of argument’ running through them.    

235    The Sutta Pitaka section of the Pali canon is the collection of general teachings by the Buddha, traditionally divided into five collections (nikaya).

1. The Digha Nikaya - the Collection of Long Discourses - contains thirty-four discourses which, as the name suggests, are of considerable length.

2. The Majjhima Nikaya - the Collection of Middle Length Discourses - contains a hundred and fifty discourses which again, as the name suggests, are neither very long nor very short.

3. The Samyutta Nikaya - the Collection of Kindred Discourses - in which 7562  discourses are  grouped according to subject matter.

4. The Anguttara Nikaya - the Collection of Gradual Discourses. ‘Anguttara’' literally means ‘up  by one’ because the nine thousand five hundred and fifty seven discourses in this collection are classified in ascending order from one to eleven.

5. The Khuddaka Nikaya - the Miscellaneous Collection - which consists of fifteen quite separate works which, because of their distinctiveness, could not be fitted into any of the other four Nikayas.

We will now briefly look at some of the more important works in this collection.

The Dhammapada is undoubtly the most popular and  well-known of all works in the  Tipitaka. It is a  collection of 423 verses (gatha) spoken by the Buddha at different times, and arranged into twenty-three  chapters roughly according to subject.                              

The Dhammapada has been translated more than any other Buddhist work. The Udana - the Verses of Uplift - derives its name from the fact that each of the eighty discourses  it contains is finished by one or more inspiring or uplifting averses (Udana). Very similar to the Udana is the Itivuttaka - the Thus Said - which contains 112 discourses, again summed up at the end by a verse or verses.    

236    The Sutta Nipata - the Discourse Collection - contains fifty-five  discourses  in the form of poems, consisting of 1149 verses altogether. The Mangala Sutta, the Metta Sutta and several other popular discourses are found in this  work.Because most of its discourses date from the early years of the Buddha's career, and  because many of them are of considerable literary merit, the Sutta Nipata is one of the most important books in the Tipitaka. Two other works of great beauty are the Theragatha - the Verses of the Monks, and the Therigatha - the Verses of the Nuns, containing 164 and 72 poems respectively, written by some of the Buddha's disciples.

Some of the poems are autobiographical, some praise the Buddha, others celebrate the beauties of nature or the joy of Enlightenment.

The “minor” (Khuddaka) Discourses, which comprises the largest section of the canon and the one that contains the widest variety of materials. It includes stories of the Buddha’s former births (Jitaka), which report how he gradually perfected the exalted  qualities of a Buddha; accounts of the lives of the great disciples (apadana); didactic verses (gatha); an influential work entitled the Path of Truth (Dhammapada); and a number of other important texts.

The biggest book in the Khuddaka Nikaya is the Jataka - the Birth Stories.  The  Jataka  consists of 547 stories drawn from ancient Indian folklore and given a Buddhist flavour by making the hero of each story the Buddha in one of his former lives.

Although flavour the Jatakas are legendary in nature, each of them contains an important moral. In fact, the Jatakas have been used for centuries to teach  Buddhist ethical ideals to simple folk. The remaining books in the Khuddaka Nikaya date from a later  period than the rest of the Tipitaka and are of less significance today.   

237    The second major division in the Tipitaka is the Vinaya Pitaka - the Basket of Discipline -  which is made up of five books. 

The Vinaya Pitaka section of the Pali canon consists of rules of conduct, which are mainly concerned with the regulation of the monastic order; i.e. the rules for monks and nuns,procedures for monastic administration, and some  events in the life of the Buddha. It also records some of the early history of  the monastic community, including an account of the  First and the Second Councils.   

Most of these are derived from specific cases in which Buddha was asked for a ruling on the conduct of particular members of the order, and the general rules he promulgated still serve as the basis for monastic conduct. The Buddha never gave an exhaustive ‘list of rules’. However, the Vinaya section consists of five books:

1. Parajika Pali

2. Pacittiya Pali

3. Mahavagga Pali

4. Culavagga Pali

5. Parivara Pali

238    The third and final divisions is the  Abhidhamma Pitaka- the Basket of Analysis, which includes scholastic treaties that codify and interpret the teachings attributed to the Buddha.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka section includes seven treaties, which organises the doctrines of particular classes of Buddha’s discourses. The Abhidhamma writers attempted to systematise the profusion of teachings  attributed to Buddha into a coherent philosophy. Their texts classify experience in terms of impermanent groupings of factors referred to as Dhamma which in aggregation

groupings are the focus of the doctrine (Dhamma) taught by Buddha.

The Abhidhamma section consists of seven books:

1. The Dhammasangani Pali

2. Vibhanga Pali Book of Analysis

3. Dhatukatha Pali

4. Puggalapannatti Pali

5. Kathavatthu Pali

6. Yamaka Pali

7. Patthana Pali

One of these books, the Kathavattu - the Points of Controversy- contains points of doctrine discussed during the Third Council, and thus is the latest book to be included in the Tipitaka. The other books contain lists of the constituents of mind  and matter, what cause has what effect, and the analysis of different personality types.

The  earliest book in the Abhidhamma was  probably composed about 150 years  after  the passing of the  Buddha and the latest, the Kathavatthu in about 253 BC. As such, the Arbi-dhamma Pitaka was not recited during the First Council,  but was added to the Tipitaka at a later time. The nature, date and  style of the  Arbidhamma means that it is the least relevant part of the Tipitaka. The Vinaya is of relevance to monks and nuns, while the Sutta Pitaka, containing as it does the Dhamma in the Buddha's own words, is the most important of all Buddhist literature.   

239  As we can see from what has been said above, the Sutta Pitaka is of considerable length, in fact well more than thirty volumes are required for the complete English translation. However, in order to aid memory at the time when they were orally transmitted, the discourses contain numerous and frequent repetitions which extend their length considerably. Also, discourses are sometimes repeated word for word or in a very similar form in two different places.

For example, the Satipatthana Sutta occurs in both the Digha and the Majjhima Nikaya, and the most of the Brahma Vagga in the Dhammapada is repeated in the Sutta Nipata. It must also be understood that the Sutta Pitaka contains some discourses spoken by the Buddha's disciples.   

240    The Tipitaka has come down to us in an  ancient Indian language  called  Magadhi so called  because it was the vernacular of the kingdom of Magadha and parts of Kosala where the Buddha spent much of his life. Eventually Magadhi came to be called Pali, meaning 'text', that is, the languageof the text.

Not all scholars agree that the Buddha spoke Pali, but if he did, there is little doubt that  he  spoke a language  very similar to it. The great philologist Wilhelm Geiger says that"Pali should be regarded as a form of Magadhi,  the  language in which Buddha himself had preached."

Professor Rhys Davids in the introduction to his Pali-english Dictionary says: “the Pali of the canonical books is based on that standard Kosala vernacular as spoken in the  6th and 7th century BC.. That vernacular was the mother tongue of the Buddha.” People sometimes ash whether it is necessary to learn Pali in order to understand the Dhamma properly.                           

During the Buddha's lifetime there were two monks who wished to put all his words into Sanskrit verse (Chandaso) because Sanskrit, being a dead language, never changed and thus the meaning of the Buddha's words would never be lost. The Buddha refused, and went on to say:       

I allow you, monks, to learn the words of the      

Buddha each in your own language.       

The Buddha's message to humankind relates to experience and can be understood through experience, not by fossilizing it in a dead language. Obviously, while it might be useful to know some Pali words, the Buddha  wanted us to learn the Dhamma in our own language, knowing that was the best way to understand it and to communicate it to others.   

241    It is easy to find  any reference one might want in sacred texts like the Bible or the Koran, because such books are  carefully divided into  chapters  and subdivided into verses. But because of the Tipitaka's size and diversity, a standard reference system has yet to be devised.

Probably the best and most widely used reference system for the Tipitaka is that used in the Pali Text Society's editions and translations, and thus we will familiarize ourselves with this system. In the top right hand corner of the left hand page of the PTS English translation of the Tipitaka is a Roman  numeral followed by a number.

The first refers to the volume of the work while the second refers to the page in the original Pali text. Thus if we are reading a book and it quotes the Tipitaka with the  references, say, A II 150, and we wanted to check the quote, this is what we would do.  We would go to the  Tipitaka, locate the Anguttara Nikaya ( ‘A’ stands  for  Anguttara  Nikaya, the Collection of Gradual Discourses), get the second volume (IIindicates Volume Two) and turn the pages, looking at the top right hand corner of the left hand page, until we got to 150.

On that page or nearby it, we would find the passage  quoted in the book we were reading. Some works in the Tipitaka, like the Dhammapada, the Sutta Nipata, the Theragatha and the Therigatha, are all in verse, so' the references for  these works will simply be to the work and the verse number.

Thus the reference for 53rd verse in the Dhammapada would beDp 53 or the 410th verse in the Sutta Nipata would be  Sn410. It may take time to get used to using this reference system but once we do, the Tipitaka will reveal its many hidden treasures to us.

Scriptures – Other Collections

Other schools developed their own distinctive canons, many of which have very different collections of texts, although the doctrines and practices they contain are similar.

Some schools developed their own distinctive canons, many of which have very different collections of texts, although the doctrines and practices they contain are similar. Some schools, such as the Sarvastivadins, used Sanskrit for their canons, but today only fragments of these collections exist, mostly in Chinese translations. Although Mahayana schools developed an impressive literature, there does not seem to have been an attempt to create a Mahayana canon in India. The surviving Mahayana canons were all compiled in other countries. Canons compiled in Mahanaya countries contain much of the material of the Pali canon, but they also include Mahanaya sutras and the other texts not found in the Pali canon.

The Chinese canon contains Mahayana sutras, Indian philosophical treatises, and a variety of other texts, but its compilation was not systematic (as compared to the Tibetan canon).

The Tibetan canon consists of the Kangyur and Tengyur, and contains a wealth of Mahayan sutras translated from Sankrit, treatises (shastra) by important Indian Buddhist thinkers, tantras and tantric commentaries, and miscellaneous writings that were deemed important enough to include in the canon. The Tibetan translators had access to a wide range of literature, due to the fact that the canon was collected in Tibet many centuries after the Chinese one.

In addition to this canonical literature; each school of Buddhism has created literature that it considers to be authoritative. It is noteworthy that the Buddha never encouraged one authoritative ‘fixed and firm’ set of scriptures, as A.G.S. Kariyawasam noted.

Once a couple of bhikkhu suggested to the Buddha that his teaching be written down in a rigid language wherein even a dot cannot be altered as in Vedic Sanskrit. The Buddha categorically disapproved the suggestion stating that it would be an offence to do so and laid it down as a directive that each person or a group of persons should master his teaching in their own mother tongue (sakaya niruttiya).